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Hiding From Your Competitors

This entry was written by one of our members and submitted to our YouMoz section.The author's views below are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz.

Recently SMX London 2009 happened. I was too busy feeling ill to attend but I did my best to follow what happened. One of the talks that sounded really good was by Mikkel deMib about hiding your site from competitors. He suggests emailing them, then using the email headers to get their IP address. I'm going to cover the code you can use to "deal with" such spies.

1) Simple redirection
If their IP address is in that array, it'll redirect them to another site.

2) Adding a touch of remembrance
Of course, they may move their IP address and try to check your site later. It's not common but it can happen and it's worth being ready for it. We need to add only a little bit more code.

3) Really being devious
Of course, it's one thing to forward them to 4chan or some other black hole of the internet, but we can be more creative than that. The first thing we can do is to forward them to http://oursite.com/index2.html, where this new link goes to an old and rubbish version of your site. Of course, all the links on this page need to be broken, etc and the page should not be indexable by Google. If you want to be downright malicious then you could add in javascript to try and lag their browser up, load in tons of big images from Wikipedia, etc.

There are many fun things you can do, but the core is that you want them to either not be able to see your site or to see a modified version of your site so that they think you have a terrible design, broken links and possibly a load time only a modem user would think was real.

My gigantic SEO brain seeks to know all things relevant to the tips tricks and tools out there. I want to have an arsenal of answers ready. Maybe not to use each and every one for every client. (I encourage experiments on my own sites without putting a clients in harms way)

But you never know what someone is going to bring up when you are doing a presentation, and nothing kills it faster than looking like a deer in the headlights because you're not "up" on something.

My gut reaction is to say I want them looking at what I'm doing. I'm doing it better than they could or I need to get better. Plus every time you start down the road of trying to limit who sees you, eventually you end up getting carried away and blocking some search robot.

When everyone in my house was whining about how good Tom Brady was, my wife (non football fan) made the ultimate observation. She said that if he was that good, the other teams should quit complaining and get better. (just a heads up, don't stop at our house if you want sympathy)

And I am sorry to add this but the Tom Brady phenomenon led to one of the greatest lines ever uttered by a sports caster. After his team got beat in the Superbowl by the second Manning brothers team, the announcer said, "Tom Brady just got beat by a guy that is not even the best quarterback in his own family."

I agree with Crash as well. While I would NEVER use these techniques, or try to "hide" from competitors (because it is impossible to do so, even if you try to do what is mentioned in this post), it is still good to know these techniques that other people/sites/competitors may be using.

I also agree with everyone who is saying you can't "hide." For instance, if you work for a giant company like me, who has giant competitors, there is no way to block everyone. You would spend your time looking like an idiot, not strategically & actively working to actually "compete."

I don't really worry about competitors in this sense. Mostly because it is impossible to stay under the radar on the web, but also because I focus on being better, working harder, and understanding what it takes to be better than the competition. If you try these techniques above (especially the one about taking them to a redirect), they won't think you are trying to hide from them. They will simply think you are an idiot for having such a hideous site. And then they will probably share that, link it (if they are smart), and then you will have lots of people thinking you're an idiot as well.

I honestly don't know anyone who uses these techniques when it comes to competition. I would be interested to know who does and how it panned out for them.

You can get competitor's IP, ok. You can redirect him to the non optimised page, even whole non optimised version of your site. Additionally, once you identify your competitor you can set a cookie to tell to your system that this is a competitor and always to redirect him, regardless of IP.

But, there are a lot of other possibilities that your competitor will access your site and not to be identified as a competitor. What if he try to access your site with his IPOD connected to hotspot in the mall. Or if he access your site with wife's compute. Or etc......... he will be laughing at you.

I'd invest my time to learn new things and to work hard instead to hide from competitors. Moreover, on page optimisation became pretty minor thing compared with off site optimisation.

Lol yeah IP redirect ok that is one thing, but putting up a site that leads to a broken page isn't something I'd ever suggest, cause you never know who will come across that.

As break said why not focus on getting better? Why spend all that time to "fool" your competition instead of just becoming better than your competition, find ways to out rank them, or gain more traffic, and/or new traffic.

I mean competition is healthy, on all levels of business, it can make you look better than the rest or it can make you work harder than the best.

I mean just us being on SEOmoz, you are interacting with "competitors" we all at any given time could be competition for the same job, etc. yet we aren't on here intentionally sabotaging each other, we all interact and help each other out.

Lol this is like an article saying that Black Hat/Grey Hat SEO methods are good and you should be using them to get ahead of your competitors.

Actually, I would love to see an article by him. Maybe "What Elmo taught me about SEO," or "SEO, the Sesame Street Years." He might get a regular installment job. "What Nap Time and SEO have in common." "SEO for Junior High" "Play Nice With Others For SEO"

I took my son to work with me when he was little (3-4) and at the time I had a very physical job cleaning carpets. I typically lost ten pounds in sweat everyday. Kyle was just running around while I was working. We went home for lunch and I fully expected to leave him home for a nap. But my lovely wife asked if her two men had been working hard.

Kyle answered yes. (in his defense he had stayed fairly busy)

Without even thinking (and being a total A$$) I blurted "I been working, you haven't done diddly." Effing brilliant, I know. No defense.

So after lunch back to work we went. This time Kyle worked his little butt off trying to redeem himself for being a kid and me trying to make him feel like everything he did was just the most help I had ever had.

Finally, he sat down beside me and asked, "Did I do diddly daddy?"

"Yes, son. You did diddly," I answered. He was very proud.

He's in his twenties now and he has nearly perfected the art of doing diddly.

As someone here said, SEOmoz comments are very often of the same value as blog posts. This time you made a comment which is a waaaay better than the post alone. What more, you succeeded it being completely off topic.

I agree with break - this seems like a lot of work with no real gain. Our competitors see our site and as long as we stay one step ahead of them, are clever, and continue to outperform them, we could care less.

Break's right; you're never really "hidden" from anyone on the Internet.

I think it's good to know that this is a possibility, but it could really come back to bite you in the butt.

Off the top of my head :

1. If you are going to block them using the IP address from mail headers, you need to make sure it's not a popular mail system like gmail, which uses it's own IP address, not the senders. otherwise, you might end up showing a bad version of your site to maaaaaaany people including google-bot. Even if it is a company specific email address (i.e. name@companyname.com) - a lot of companies don't host their own mail, they use someone like mediatemple or bluehost, or the mail from their local service provider (i.e. name@cox.net). Though this wouldn't affect many, there are most likely un-intended consequences you can't possibly predict, especially if you try to block an entire D or even C block of addresses. You could really end up screwing yourself here.

2. If someone is interested in buying you out, you'll turn what could have been a 7 digit paycheck into a 5 minute laugh session for your competitor.

Seems like an amazing waste of time - there are just so many ways that your target could see your site, and several ways in which you could end up blocking real customers!

That said, there are a lot of bone-headed folks out there, and some of them manage to run websites (somehow) - so, I suppose that I could encounter someone doing this to me. Might make me check out the next really stupid competitor site through an SE cache, the Wayback machine, online translation, a cyber-cafe, etc......

How's about you just localize your website and NEVER FTP it to your server - then you'll have the spies beaten. You can save the time you would have spent blocking each IP from every computer ever and stop doing SEO altogether because you've made it to the pinnacle of your career...the "spy proof optimized website".

That makes a lot more sense then trying to just stop a competitor seeing your site, if you are trying to stop them seeing a product while you get a foot hold in the market it might just help, otherwise it just sounds a bit "tin foil hat" to me.

I don't consider this to be a light-hearted post to not take seriously. Many people come here for guidance and insight from those in the field. It is wrong on many levels to come in here and throw information around that is misleading, incorrect, and damaging to ones own career and clients.

From the SMX London agendas it seems this would have been in the "Give it up!" section where SEOs and audience share their hot tips with the proviso:

Attendees vow not to blog what’s discussed for the now traditional 30 day waiting period. Search reps in the audience agree to a 30 day delay in fixing any loopholes, too — or give up their own secret.

That was on 19 May 2009, it's 5 June, not 30 days yet

Incidentally I think the Editorial team should have caught this and checked with Mikkel deMib Svendsen to check that is what he said. I'm guessing he was on about redirecting clients links from content (images) on your site and not actually redirect clients themselves. Why do I say that? Well because he's blogged about that I think (in Danish, which I don't read).

I read his post on SMX London (he mentions the prohibition but no clues on his tip) he does mention that the tip will be in his new book ...